


Consolation Prize

by valedecems (orphan_account)



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Episode: s03e12 The Sound of Drums, Episode: s03e13 Last of the Time Lords, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Oneshot, Sad Ending, Tenth Doctor/The Master if you squint, The Doctor & The Master (Doctor Who) Friendship, The Doctor and the Master as children, The Doctor's past, The Master Has Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-20
Updated: 2020-02-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:29:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22808647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/valedecems
Summary: “Doctor,” says Koschei, but he does not say that, because that is not his name yet. The title does not matter. “Make me a promise.” ... “Promise me you’ll be my friend forever.”Despite everything, the Doctor keeps his promise.
Relationships: The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who)
Kudos: 26





	Consolation Prize

The Doctor is seven years old.

“What do you think it will be like?” His friend asks him. They are lying in fields of crimson grass. A vague wind is rustling silver leaves, which refract the light of two opposing suns, leaving spatters of kaleidoscopic shadows on their cheeks. In the distant horizon, the Citadel looms, promising a future that neither can gauge the nature of. They are alone, but they are together.

His friend’s name is Koschei. His hair falls flat across his forehead, tousled by the wind. He is happy. It shows. His eyes bleed gold between eyelashes that cast shadows across his full cheeks.

“Exciting,” the Doctor responds. His hand finds Koschei’s. It is warm, and despite the forthcoming clamminess of their skin, their fingers interlock. Nothing will tear them apart. Their futures are bright and they aren’t thinking about the clock that seeps with the promise of separation.

“Doctor,” says Koschei, but he does not say that, because that is not his name yet. The title does not matter. “Make me a promise.”

It is innocent. “Okay,” he chirps. The details of the oath are unnecessary, for he knows he will keep it. Koschei’s grip slips, and they are caught in each other’s gaze.

“When we’re old…” He starts, and the Doctor snickers. The concept is foreign to him. “We will still be like this.”

It’s a strange thing to ask of a seven-year-old. It’s a strange thing to be asked by a seven-year-old. The Doctor’s head tilts. “What do you mean?”

“I want to be your friend forever,” Koschei reiterates himself. He’s always been quicker than the Doctor. His intelligence is inspiring. “Promise me you’ll be my friend forever.”

“I promise,” he says, and they laugh. The sound is captured by the trees.

The Doctor is eight years old.

Koschei is buzzing with excitement. The Doctor can feel it in the tremble of his hand. They are in a line of a thousand other eight-year-olds, and none of them are speaking. Their eyes are fixed on a destination that seems centuries away, promising a glimpse into the depths of time, brutal and honest. They have heard the tales of genius and terror, but their optimistic, naïve minds hone in on the former.

“What do you think it will be like?” Koschei asks him. His voice is hushed, barely audible over the quaking breaths of a thousand likeminded children. The Doctor squeezes his hand.

“Exciting,” he whispers back.

As the numbers in front of them dwindle, time appears to move faster. The Doctor isn’t sure if it’s a result of the anomaly or the crescendoing anticipation, and he doesn’t care. Koschei is first. A squeeze of his palm sends him forth to his destiny. When he steps forward, the Doctor’s arm falls awkwardly to his side.

He watches as Koschei exchanges brief words with the Time Lord before them. He doesn’t know his name, but he looks vast and omniscient as he pushes for Koschei to take his first glance into the schism.

The Doctor can see his friend’s face morph from fascination to an expression he doesn’t have a word for. In the future, he will call it agony. Koschei’s body stills, and the low chatter of the queue comes to a halt. They are all waiting to see his reaction. He wishes he had seen the previous responses, so he can differentiate between what is ‘normal’ and what is ‘abnormal’, but he has no notes to call upon. The anticipation in the Doctor’s chest bubbles over and sours, revealing the mortifying creature underneath. This is the first time he has ever experienced dread.

The Time Lord places his hand on Koschei’s back and guides him away. He stumbles toward the Academy, and the Doctor mentally urges his friend to turn and face him, to tell him what it was he saw.

He does not.

The Doctor musters all the courage he can manifest and steps forward. His legs are struggling to hold his weight, and he is suddenly aware of his hearts pounding in his chest. The Time Lord’s eyes, behind the frosty, inscrutable veil, harbour sorrow. He steps toward the figure and fights his natural reflexes to avert his gaze, instead fixating them on the Vortex.

His mind pulses and explodes and collapses like a supernova, hypnotised by a spot of anti-reality that simultaneously draws him in and begs him to _run_ , and run, and run…

He sees his faces etched in sadness. He sees blazes and torment and loss, he sees everything and nothing. He is burdened to watch the worlds he knows and the world he will know burn and shatter by natural and contrived causes, and is made inexplicably aware of just how fast the planet that anchors him is spinning, hurtling through space. One millimetre to the left and they would all be eviscerated by a black hole. One millimetre to the right and they would be scorched with the force of suns locked in constant war. He sees time, and it is, for lack of a better word, grotesque. Vast and constant, omnipotent and never stopping, never waiting. Unforgiving and brutally equal. He is collapsing on himself, suddenly aware of just how large _infinity_ really is.

He feels like he has aged a thousand years, but a hand guides him away from the schism and he realises that in reality, it has been seconds. Still spinning from the mental tribulation, he trudges in the direction of the Academy, desperate to see his friend.

The crowd is engulfing, and the Doctor can’t find his friend. Seconds fade into minutes into hours, and he is soon chanting with his fellow inductees an oath that is in no form as important as the one he recalls from only a year prior.

“I swear to protect the ancient Law of Gallifrey with all my might and brain,” he says, voice dull of emotion or conviction. “I will to the end of my days, with justice and with honour temper my actions and my thoughts.”

Hatred sparks. He is angry.

He is silent as a recognition code is intrusively woven into his DNA. He is silent as he is milled with other students, like sheep, into their assigned dormitories. He is silent as he stares vacantly at the unlit ceiling with the weight of reality on his shoulders, and he is silent when he hears ragged sobs from across the room from the children who felt the same way as him. He is captivated by the guttural cries, and wishes for that same capability to fall apart.

“Koschei,” he whispers into the dark, hoping that, in the chaos, he had somehow missed his friends face; hoping that if his dearest companion was in the same room as him, he was awake and will respond to his call.

He does not.

The Doctor is graduating from the Pydronian Academy.

The ceremony is prestigious. A crowd of scarlet robes and dramatic, aureate headpieces. His name is called. He approaches the stage, mutters a word of thanks, and bows meekly in response to the applause. He does not waste any time shuffling off the stage, embarrassed to a degree that appears unreasonable. As he leaves, he hears a name called to collect their certificate, and his head swivels.

His old friend walks on stage with an exaggerated, theatrical energy. He grins at the applause, lets out a single cheer, and preens himself, thriving on the attention. Behind the smile, his eyes are wild and calculating. They fall on the Doctor’s, narrow, and tear away before satisfaction is found in the brief contact. Even in the presence of the highest-ranking Gallifreyans, he looks massive and commandeering; a joyous politician preparing for a reign of terror. The Doctor wants nothing more than to wait up, to run to him and clutch his hands, ask him why it is they haven’t said so much as a word to each other in all the years they spent at the Academy, but he does not.

Instead, he tunes into the urge he has been suppressing since the night that tore him apart, bubbling below the lid in a psychic valve that promises explosion if its demands are not met, and he runs.

Away from the crowd, away from the friends he made, away from the world that ruined him and the only thing in the universe that held any semblance of value to him. He runs and runs and he doesn’t stop until he finds himself in the TARDIS bay, where he chooses a vessel and flies away with it. If he had looked back, he would have seen his friend staring after him with equal parts contempt and adoration. If he looks back now, he will stay forever, begging for attention from a friend lost to the mistress that is the Vortex.

He does not.

The Doctor is nine hundred and three years old, staring at four letters on a screen that will dictate the very fate of the world he loves.  
The words of the Face of Boe echo through his mind as the final pieces are put together. His mind is racing with possibility and fear and dread and, regretfully, hope. He runs; the seconds blur together until he is slamming on the door of a locked TARDIS, begging for the man he formerly recognised to be Professor Yana to “let me in, _let me in!_ ”  
The door won’t budge. He backs away, eyes wide and throat constricted, and turns his attention to Martha, who is huddled over Chantho. He feels a tug in his chest. Among everything else, the last thing he wants to feel is sorrow.   
“I’m begging you, everything’s changed! It’s only the two of us. We’re the only ones left. Just let me in!” His voice is raw. He doesn’t even know if the man inside can hear him. He tugs at strands of his hair. Everything is crashing down upon him. His blood is screeching through his ears, the joint effort of his pounding hearts creating an anticipatory drumroll for the events to come. He knows how this will end. He doesn’t want to believe it.

A stream of golden light and a visceral scream sneaks through the cracks in the TARDIS door. The Doctor heaves a breath and stands back, doing his best to not collapse right there. There are shouts coming from behind him, animal-like grunts from the Futurekind, vying to be let in so they can tear the inhabitants of the room to shreds until they are nothing but dust. He hears Captain Jack Harkness call to him, but his eyes are transfixed on his ship. His breathing quickens, deepens, as his adrenaline-rich brain begs for something to sustain itself with.

“Now then, Doctor…” The words are muffled by the speaker system, but are clear in the Doctor’s mind. The anxiety doubles, triples, and he is mesmerised by the words. “Why don’t we stop and have a nice little chat while I tell you all my plans and you can work out a way to stop me, I _don’t_ think!”

Martha speaks behind him. He doesn’t care. “I’m asking you, really, properly, just stop. Just _think!_ ”

“Use my name,” it is a taunt. His expression hardens. Through a shaky voice, he submits.

“Master,” _Koschei_. “I’m sorry.” He is desperate for his old friend to consider him, an old, desperate companion; to consider their oath, bathed in golden sunlight; to consider their bond, the kinship they share.

He does not.

“ _Tough!_ ”

He watches the TARDIS dematerialise and feels disappointment wrapped in fury wrapped in sorrow. He feels the emotions introduced to him by the Untempered Schism multiply tenfold and light inside of him like forest fires, burning the silver-leaved trees and scorching the crimson grass.

The Doctor is on the phone with the only other person in the known universe who could even begin to understand the peaks and troughs of his life.

“I’m here,” he says. He is calm. His thoughts are collected, and he can hear the pause on the receiver as the Master’s mind stammers. That pause, despite everything, sparks something in him. If he can garner an emotional reaction from a man so twisted by insanity and violence, he can hold hope like a butterfly, delicate and small, in the palm of his hand.

“Doctor,” the word is whispered.

“Master,” he returns the greeting.

“I like it when you use my name,” the Doctor can hear the chill in his voice, the uncertainty and the raw energy spilling out of his pores and through the phone’s poor microphone.

“You chose it,” he raises his eyebrows. There is a comradery here, a palpable sense of brotherhood despite the longstanding rivalry. Hate can only mask the underlying immovable and irrational love. “Psychiatrist’s field day.”  
“As you chose yours,” there is a lilt in the letters that serves as a strange, mocking reminder. “The man who makes people better. How sanctimonious is that?”

“So, Prime Minister, then?” He changes the subject, uncomfortable with the feat of explaining his chosen title. If there is anything he has learned about his friend over the years he has spent fighting him, it is that he loves to talk, to gloat about his short-lived victories.

They speak like this for a while, one-upping each other, erring between a fine line of reverence and admittance that yes, their accomplishments are impressive, and snide, sneer tones that counteract each other in the most chilling of ways.

The Master asks about Gallifrey, and his hearts sink. Here is the moment where he repents his sins to the only person who will listen, to the only person who he can be sure would have once done the same if not malformed by the insanity bestowed upon him by unknowable, unreachable forces.

“I ran, I ran so far…” The Master recounts. It’s a confession that fuels empathy at the highest amount. In this moment, they are one and the same. Two warriors who ran from their battlefield. Two cowards, clutching at importance by any means necessary.

He admits the ending. He reasons with his guilt, but the Master does as the Master has always done, and he pushes the constraints the Doctor is comfortable, lays his hand on the darkest and most feral parts of his mind and holds them in a vice grip. He details his plan, twisted and uppity, confident that the Doctor can by no means stop him.

So he deflects, and he gets angry, and pushes and masks his demands. They are a sheep in wolf’s clothing, promising strength and vigour and consequences that will never come to fruition. “Not on Earth,” he snarls.

“Too late,” and to his question, the Master adds, “the drumming.”

Enlightenment.

An ugly memory rears its head, and the Doctor is forced to lay his mind’s eye upon the ghostly face of Koschei as he was drawn away from the Schism. He sees the change in him, gradual and yet to sudden, from a child who loves the bones of his best friend to a man who would pick them out, one by one, just to make a weak replica of the Eiffel Tower.

The Master is talking down the phone, spitting out words as they come about the rhythm that haunts his waking life.

“I could help you. Please, let me help,” he begs, but the Master does not listen. He continues his delusion, grabbing at the chance to make the Doctor understand his plight, to hear the underscore of his brain that sends him into constant and unadulterated frenzy.

He does not.

“Here come the drums.”

The Doctor is silent as the world he loves crumbles beneath him.

The Master grips the handles of his wheelchair and spins him around. He does not move, does not wince or weep or beg. He waits, and he waits, and watches as the Master destroys everything he holds dear, everything he loves, just to get a reaction. Just to see his eyes move a little bit faster, or his breath to quicken, but he does not. He stays impassive and inscrutable for all the time it takes, much to the Master’s dismay. He wonders if underneath it all, his old friend wants him to be impressed. He wonders if all of this was a bid for his attention, for a relationship they could never have, tainted by deceit and ruin. Simply, he wonders if all of this is an act of what the Master thinks love should be.

“They say Martha Jones has come back home,” he says, vengeful glee bouncing off each word. “Now why would she do that?”

The Doctor takes the bait. “Leave her alone,” he says through struggling lungs.

“But you said something to her, didn’t you? On the day I took control. What did you tell her?”

“I have one thing to say to you,” his voice is low and, beyond his predicament, commanding. “You know what it is.”

The Master’s hackles rise and he, despite everything, displays a level of thinly masked fear as he calls out a snide “oh, no you don’t!” and pushes his wheelchair out to the corner of the ship’s room.

The tannoy announces their arrival in Zone One, and the plan is put into place, signalled by a subtle hand gesture.

The clock ticks to three o’clock. Captain Jack pulls his chains from their bearings in the wall, and the screech of alarm sirens call ‘condition red’ into every ear that can listen. The Jones family launches into action – it all moves so quickly, and in seconds, a laser screwdriver is thrown into the Doctor’s grasp and pointed threateningly at his captor.

“Oh, I see,” he raises his arms in surrender, but he sounds a little too joyous for comfort.

“I told you,” the Doctor snarls. “I have one thing to say.”

The Master’s laugh is not what he expects to hear. It sends chills down his spine and adrenaline through his veins. The hands gripping the screwdriver tremble – this was not the plan. But what else could he expect? The two had been trained in the same Academy, in the same institution, with the same skills and similar backgrounds. Whatever the Doctor could do, the Master could do – and this time, he had done it better. He stalks toward the Doctor like a leopard upon an unsuspecting gazelle, and plucks the screwdriver from his grasp with a sneer. “Isomorphic controls,” he punctuates the revelation with a strike that sends the Doctor hurtling to the ground. “Which means, they only work for _me_. Like this.” He doesn’t see the beam hurtle in the direction of Francesca, but he hears her yelp. “Say sorry,” he demands. When she complies, he jaunts down the stairs. “Didn’t you learn anything from the blessed Saint Martha? Siding with the Doctor is a very dangerous thing to do.” He orders for their riddance.

As they are roughly escorted out, the Master creates a show of returning the Doctor to his chair. Where the act would have once been one of grace and care, it instead drips with a point of how feeble the man once titled the Oncoming Storm had become, trapped in a body that weakens and endlessly frustrates him.

The Master talks, mocks what he has become, but the Doctor is staring vacantly into his eyes. He is captivated by them – the sheen and the darkness, the shadows cast by his lashes now engulfing the entirety of his being. Once, they glowed a bright blue. He clutches to that memory.

“I just need you to listen,” he wheezes.

He does not.

The Doctor watches the Master through the bars of a cage, explaining the details of his plans without discretion or deviation. He is certain, deadest, and the Doctor can only stare. An attempt is made, a plea to stop, but it falls on deaf ears – or rather, ears that are battered and bruised by the endless drumming. He calls it a call to war, punishes the Doctor for being unable to share in his insanity.

“Tell me you can hear it, Doctor,” he breathes, and the Doctor lunges forward, clasps hands etched with wrinkles and varicose veins around the bars. “Tell me.”

“It’s only you,” he replies.

“Good,”

It is not good. He knows, in his heart of hearts, that his friend is clinging to the idea of being understood, of being known, but the year has worn the Doctor weary, the hope in the hearth dwindling like the ashed cherry of a cigarette, lying untouched in the depths of a London drain.

He tells the tale of Utopia, and Lucy speaks through a voice that is not her own. She sounds as though she is reading off of a script, counting the words in her head before they travel from her throat. He can hear the Master behind the syllables, directing and dictating every movement and every gesture with no hope of deviance from his rule. This is the moment in which he realises that she is the first victim, patient zero. He stares at the two of them through eyes worn by immeasurable age.

They leave without so much as a goodbye.

Martha Jones has returned, and despite everything he knows to be true, fear piques. He was not privy to information regarding her journey, and can only hope that she managed the impossible. He pushes himself against the bars, caged as witness to what could be the end of all things or the rebirth of a planet and people he adores, and waits.

She laughs under her breath.

It’s a beautiful sound, a joyous sound, a sound that wipes the fear from his wrinkled chest and replaces it with pride.

The Doctor and the Master are the same in almost every respect, bar humanity. Bar kindness and hope and love, and the weakness has been exploited, because his age-old plight for power, for victory, had him believe that the plan the Doctor set in place was one of malice.

He sees the Master’s face, clouded with cocky confidence, fall into realisation and terror as he finally wraps his head around what the year has brought him. Past, he sees fear.

The Doctor is growing. He is healing. His body is rebuilding itself in a way that could be described as celestial, shattering the cage around him and bringing the Master down to the final resort. Begging. On his terms, they are orders, shouting and pleading at the Doctor to _Stop it_. _Don’t. Stop this right now!_

In the haze of blue light, he sees Lucy’s mouth utter his name, joining the chant. He speaks now, not in the way he spoke before, backed with fear, but spurred with strength. “The one thing you can’t do. Stop them thinking,” he says, feeling his head grow heavier as his tousled hair returns to its rightful place. The laser screwdriver screeches in his direction, but it is futile. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” He drawls out, sending the weapon sprawling across the ground.

“You can’t do this. You can’t do this! It’s not fair!” For the first time, he sees defeat in the Master. He sees Koschei, the boy he lost, cracked and broken by time and mania.

“You know what happens now,” he advances toward him, ignoring the varying ‘no’s that he sputters out. “You didn’t listen, because you know what I’m going to say.”

“No!”

The Doctor’s feet touch the ground, and he is left looming over the collapsed man, curled in the foetal position on the floor, protecting his head from an inconceivable threat. In that moment, they are in a bubble, alone, unwatched by the audience on board. They are in the field, clutching each other’s hands and promising an oath that has stood steadfast through all of time.

He places a hand on the Master’s back, crouches, and pulls him into an awkward, protective hug. “I forgive you,” he whispers over the sobs and sniffles. Because he does, because that is all he has ever done.

The spell breaks as he is faced by the fact that the world is still at risk, that they are in the eye of the storm, and words are shouted between them as he and the Master are sent, together, to Earth, to the shipyards where rockets stand, prepared to be sent into the sky.

“We shall stand upon this Earth together as it burns,” the Master threats, clutching a black hole converter in his sweaty palm.

“Weapon after weapon after weapon. All you do is talk and talk and talk. But over all these years, and all these disasters, I’ve always had the greatest secret of them all,” the Doctor says, ignoring the dire situation, ignoring the ships and the Valiant and the time he spent frail and decrepit, for favour of where they are now. It’s ironic, he notes, that the point in which he cracks the Master’s cage is in a field, alone and isolated from the rest of the world, just as they were as children. “I know you. Explode those ships, you kill yourself. That’s the one thing you can never do.” He reaches his hand out. He’s not sure what he wants more; for the device to be delivered to him or his old friend’s hand. He decides. “Give that to me.”

He does.

The world groans and shakes with the vigorous energy of the missiles, and the Doctor leaps to teleport them back onto the Valiant, jolted by the turbulence of time’s reversal, and he catches his Martha Jones in his arms with a smile. Victory, he thinks. For him, and ultimately, for the Master.

The paradox has broken, and Earth has been restored. He explains the situation to his friends, and is sent back into his senses at a whoop from Jack, who holds the Master captive in arms stained by soot and grit. It’s fitting, really, that the man who locked him up for a year would end up being apprehended by the captain.

Ideas are thrown about the fate of the Master, and the Doctor reels at the idea of execution.

“That’s not the solution,” he snaps. “You’re my responsibility from now on. The only Time Lord left in existence.” The idea is naïve and hopeful, and the Master rolls the thought around his head, faced with humiliation of the highest degree: captivity.

“You mean you’re just gonna… Keep me?” He asks. The conviction in his voice has long since departed. The Doctor nods.

“It’s time to change. Maybe I’ve been wandering for too long. Now, I’ve got something to care for.”

He doesn’t see the gun before he hears its shot. He sees the Master stumble backward before he sees the wound, and in a flash, he rushes to his old friend’s side, easing him down and holding him close. “I’ve got you.” The words are useless.

“Always the women,” one more jab. There is a sense of renewed victory in the Master’s voice that chills him. “Dying in your arms. Happy now?”

An agony tears at his throat. “You’re not dying, don’t be silly. It’s only a bullet. Just regenerate.” He speaks the words quickly. His voice does not tremble. It is an order.

“No,”

“One little bullet, come on,” he grunts.

“I guess you don’t know me so well. I refuse.”

“Regenerate. Just regenerate, please, please! Just regenerate. Come on,” he didn’t think it would be this way, he didn’t think it would feel like this, but his arms are heavy with the weight of his friend and he didn’t _shoot_ the gun, but his hands feel oily and greasy as though he had, as though the bullet lodged in the Master’s skin is etched with his name, his real name, and he is begging, because his old friend is _all he has_ , because he’s hungry and he’s hollow and he’s clutching to the chances of having someone to call his friend, his honest-to-goodness friend without an imbalance of power or a sense of disunity, without the secrets or the lies, with oaths carried to the end of the universe and with love that is hard to describe but quintessential to both of their very beings, and “please, it can’t end like this. You and me, all the things we’ve done.” He lists them then, as though he can’t remember, as though he is pulling his teeth to show him that living is worth the pain, that he loves him unconditionally, because “we’re the only two left. No one else. _Regenerate!_ ” He screeches, desperate. There’s a tear on his cheek, but he can’t remember shedding it.

“How about that? I win,” his face changes expressions, shifting under pain and power and sweet victory and anticipation and _fear_. “Will it stop, Doctor? The drumming? Will it stop?” He pauses, and his gaze clouds. “What do you think it will be like?” He grunts each syllable, pained.

The Doctor finds himself in the grips of his own memory, and he knows the answer. He knows what he is supposed to say, and, on autopilot, he does. “Exciting,” his voice is barely above a whimper.

The Master’s eyes roll back in his head. The Doctor prays that some deep part of him will take over, force him to regenerate, to live, to _stay_ , to accept his invitation, to see the worlds and the stars through a good man’s eyes, to recount stories and smile and laugh and _heal_ , and he hopes this as he holds his body close to his chest, and he hopes this as he screams and jerks and weeps.

He does not.

The Doctor is nine hundred and three years old, and his best friend is dead.


End file.
